


Lacunae

by thaliaarche



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Gen, Self-Harm, Wordcount: 100
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2019-02-08 23:14:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12875100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thaliaarche/pseuds/thaliaarche
Summary: Even demons may be haunted.





	Lacunae

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Obliteration](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8708512) by [tangablesadness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangablesadness/pseuds/tangablesadness). 



> Inspired by a theory tangablesadness introduced me to that demons forget their contracts once they consume their masters' souls.

Fiends should forget their contracts, and gladly. When a victim’s soul passes their lips, they sink back into hell with a full stomach and an empty mind.

Upon awaking in the underworld, this demon unrolls the shadowy tendrils of its limbs, so long confined in a human frame. It revels in this freedom, in blanketing the landscape of hell with an even deeper black. It stretches slowly, still lazing in the comfortable drowsiness that follows an excellent meal.

It should have forgotten everything from above.

It frowns, still sensing the soul on its tongue, sweet and delicate like spun sugar.

* * *

This demon indulges in sleep, chasing blissful rest deep as a coma, only to be awoken rudely by someone calling its name. Yes, there is an echo in its ears, and a twinge near its left claws.

These must be remnants of a dream. Given that no one still alive has ever learned this demon’s true name, no one could possibly utter it.

Then the demon realizes the name it just heard had only three syllables, fewer than its true title, yet the word nonetheless felt appropriate, with a hissing “s” that fit a serpent like itself.

A strange dream.

* * *

The demon dreams of chopping vegetables by hand, a preposterous fancy— it doubts it has ever chopped vegetables, since magic would accomplish the same task far more efficiently. Yet the visions of vegetables recur, along with images of manually washing clothes and sweeping floors even as cutlery falls clattering from folds of a black coat.

With time, the demon’s dreams turn bloodier and even more bizarre. It dreams of being sawed open, of stabbing itself, of breathing in a fiery vapor and weeping tears of blood— all indignities no demon should ever accept.

Yet the dreams feel vivid as memories.

* * *

Though hell is a land of gray and an infinite array of blacks, this demon opens its eyes one year and finds its whole body threaded with a sparkling sapphire blue.

Struck by a passion almost like panic, it claws at its skin. It chops off its limbs. It takes a knife and digs into its skin, striving to extract every one of the pearlescent veins. It bathes in holy water that burns, blazes against its nerves, and it scrubs itself raw.

Still the damned blue remains. The threads cluster more thickly, glow more brightly the deeper this demon cuts.

* * *

It collapses, cursing whatever monster bonded to it during its last contract.

Though logically its last master must have been a human being, there is no other word but “monster” for this creature that persists beyond its assigned end. It taunts, it taints, it tortures, in flagrant defiance of the rules that would have it fade quietly.

(Is it the meal that’s rotten, or the diner?)

At last, the fiend smiles on the blue that scars its black, and it learns to peer willingly into the spaces in its memory, grasping for more.

(This demon’s always preferred a full mind.)


End file.
